So I was thinking about Edje’s comment on Russell’s “Why I am a Tory” post:

If the British had stuck to the Proclamation of 1763 indefinitely (forbidding English subjects from settling west of the Appalachians) I think it would have made it rather difficult to implement any sort of centralized gathering scheme. The reaction would have been similar to what actually happened in the US, but with centralized law enforcement and nowhere to go, the Mormons would have been eradicated.

If I recall the diggers attempted a commune in 17th century England and were eradicated. Yet, if I recall, a major reason for the Proclamation of 1763 was to keep the colonists from encroaching on native lands. Since Russell had us on the topic of 1 Nephi 13, I’ll quote verse 14: “And it came to pass that I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon the land of promise; and I beheld the wrath of God, that it as upon the seed of my brethren; and they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten.”

If the Mormons needed to have a frontier to flee to, were they a part of the manifest destiny movement, or were they fleeing from it?

As one whose “to-read” pile lends a large shadow over both my desk and nightstand, devotional history books put out by publishers like Deseret Book or Covenant Press don’t usually make the list. However, a couple weeks I decided to download the audio version of a recent “popular” devotional/historical work.[1] While this post is formatted like a standard book review, I hope that it will serve as a “springboard” of sorts to discuss the practice of writing history for the faithful masses. (more…)

Today while going door to door collection money for our kids’ school with my almost eight-year-old daughter, I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. She said “I don’t know, maybe I want to be an artist or a student like you,” and she affectionately kissed me on the arm. While she meant it as a sign of affection I had to interject, “Wait honey, a student isn’t something you do when you grow up, it’s something you do in order to do something else. You see, I want to be a professor.” To this she responded in a very sympathetic voice, “Do you really think you’ll be able to do that?” To which I responded, “Yes, of course.” To which her reply (having lost the sympathetic tone) “Yeah right, in like 10 years or something.” (more…)

What follows is a portion of the paper I presented at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association last week in Springfield, IL. The paper focused on the religious lives of Latter-day Saints in the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My aim was to move narratives of the LDS experience in the South beyond analyses of missionaries who served there and the persecution and violence they encountered; to explore the lives of those Saints who were baptized but didn’t migrate West. One of the most interesting aspects of the lives of these “un-gathered” Saints was their patterns of worship. (more…)

Perhaps it is the heretical imp in me, but I have often shifted in my seat uncomfortably as I sit in classes at BYU and in the church house while folks accept as axiomatic all the talk about the American revolution as merely the harbinger of the Restoration. The argument goes like this: the gospel could not be established in a land of tyranny, it is argued. Whatever the errors or skeletons of our founding fathers (if they be admitted at all), they served as Cyrus figures for the Saints. They were “wise men” who helped to shake the shackles of tyranny from the colonists (“shake” here should be read as war and destruction of human life—just so we’re on the same page). I have two problems with this: 1) I hate war. Elder McConkie is correct: war is one of the greatest tools of Satan and 2) while no nation is free from the blood of innocents, for being the land of freedom, America has not been kind to LDS ideals to say nothing of the LDS people. To soothe my theo-ideological angst, I sometimes engage in a rather subversive counterfactual: could the Lord have carried out the restoration in a British America? (more…)

After months of cajoling, Steve Fleming has finally agreed to join the Juvenile Instructor on a permanent basis. Here’s a short bio:

Stephen J. Fleming is a PhD. candidate at UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies and a 2008 Bushman fellow. Steve received his B.A. in history from BYU and his M.A. from UC Stanislaus, also in history. He would like to write a dissertation on survivals of crypto-Catholicism and resistance to disenchantment from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution. He has been published in Church History, Religion and American Culture, and Max Weber Studies, as well as various Mormon journals and he is currently revising his MA thesis, which treats Mormonism in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia and surrounding regions) for publication.

Here are the links for Steve’s guest posts:

http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/what-is-our-obligation-the-2008-bushman-seminar/

http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/science-as-a-vocation/

Join us in welcoming Steve.

We greet you from Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln.  It’s been a good conference so far.  We’ve here combined our notes from the respective sessions we attended. Our notes are fragmentary, but will give our readers a sense of the presentations. (more…)

Award Recipients from the 2009 MHA Awards Banquet. (more…)

Well, this week the Mormon History Association Conference will be in full swing at Springfield, Illinois. The preliminary program is here.

Panel Changes:

There has been at least one change to the schedule that you should be made aware of. The panel I’m a part of with Paul Reeve and Stan Thayne has moved to 2B, Friday 2:00 to 3:30 pm. It had been on Saturday.  Presumably (we haven’t gotten any definite word), our panel switched with Chris, Ed and Mark Brown’s panel, which would place them in our old spot of 6A.  So, be tuned to that and come out to see us! (more…)

*A caveat: I am taking a conscious cue from Richard Hofstadter—this is a line of inquiry rather than a footnote-drenched piece of archive-based scholarship.

Brigham Young University appears to be the idyllic city on a hill—founded with the college-building impulse of American missionary zeal and molded to fit the Zion-building strain of Mormonism’s early days of development. Yet anyone who has lived on the campus—or even visited the campus—talks about the nascent “tension” that undergirds social relationships. (more…)

If to some it seems presumptuous to call Joseph Smith a prophet, it will probably seem downright asinine to suggest that he was a poet too. And yet that’s the proposition I’d like to put forward in this post. The typical narrative renders Joseph as the unlearned ploughboy that he was, who could, as Emma assures us, hardly write a well-worded letter. But anyone who’s looked at how Joseph actually spoke and wrote (including anyone who’s followed along at all in the Gospel Doctrine course recently) knows that he used language in some interesting ways, ways that for some reason we do not often see language being used nowadays in the Church. (more…)

Please join the JI in welcoming our newest guest blogger, Russell, who offers the following introduction: (more…)

Here’s another post authored by occasional guest blogger and friend to JI, Bored in Vernal. Enjoy!

I’ve been enthralled by the portrait of Mormon women painted by Edward W. Tullidge in his 1877 book The Women of Mormondom. He called them women of a new age, of new types of character, religious empire-founders, and even bestowed upon Mormon women the title “apostles.” Of course, the term “apostle” when associated with the female sex was not, in the late 1800′s, fraught with as much tension as it is today. Yet I was still interested to investigate the impulse which led Tullidge to employ this word when speaking of our nineteenth-century sisters. (more…)

Patriarchal blessings have always been an important aspect of Mormonism, and serve as a great window through which to interpret early Mormon thought. One key to understanding Joseph Smith Sr.’s role as the first patriarch is to recognize that the bestowal of “patriarchal blessings” was a crucial step for Latter-day Saints to connect themselves with the authority of the past. Jan Shipps noted that early Mormonism was a “movement in which leader and followers were together living through—recapitulating—the stories of Israel and early Christianity”[1]—the implementation of patriarchal blessings was an important way to do this. (more…)

This post continues a typology of Community of Christ historians currently working in the field. Continuing with the Biblical theme, this post considers historians running in different directions—the Jonahs running away from the tradition and the Pauls who have had their road to Damascus experience and changed allegiances. (more…)

Historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith once quipped that “a comparison is a disciplined exaggeration in the service of knowledge” (Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, p. 52). With this caveat in mind for what the comparative enterprise entails, at the invitation of the JI permabloggers, I’ve constructed a short typological overview of Community of Christ historians currently in the field. My schema is a bit artificial (there aren’t that many historians to classify in the first place), but I’ve done so simply to serve “a useful end.” This short essay looks at four categories of CofC historians and highlights one or two representatives from each type: the priests (historians who work for the church), the Isaiahs (the faithful iconoclasts), the Jonahs (the disillusioned historians), and the Pauls (the converts). (more…)

This is a continuation of sorts of a previous post on the imagined underworld of Porfirian Mexico City.

William Schell Jr. provides an insightful glimpse into what he calls the American Colony in Mexico during the Porfiriato in his Integral Outsiders: The American Colony in Mexico City, 1876-1911.  Principally, Schell counters the idea that greedy American capitalists took advantage of an impotent Mexican people.  Instead, Schell describes a complex give-and-take relationship between American interests in Mexico and the Mexican elites.  Along with this, Schell pays close attention to how colonists constructed “yanquiness” and race to help define relationships within the colony and with the greater Mexican populous.  (more…)

As a follow up to my post on Glenn Beck’s drawing upon a certain strain of Mormon apocalyptic folklore in articulating his political positions (and the mainstream media’s ignoring the influence of Beck’s religion on those positions), I thought readers might be interested in the latest instance illustrating it. (more…)

I’ve been surprised that the following recent events and statements have not received more attention from the bloggernacle. I thought I’d briefly announce and discuss them here, as I think they are relevant both to scholars interested in Mormonism and race/ethnicity and to Latter-day Saints whose lives these events affect in very real ways. (more…)